Too large of a team?

[santosh]

Our team next year will have 140+ members. This year we had 84 and honestly didn't know what to do with all these people. Freshmen usually join robotics to build a robot because they don't know all the aspects of robotics and what FIRST and the Chairman's Award is about. So when we put them on teams such as Lego or Scouting, they drop out of the club.

Now our numbers are going up. This time we will try and make a larger point of what FIRST and Robotics is about in the hopes that we can keep all of our members. We are trying to enter more engineering contests and other things like that. But is there anyone out there who has experience with large number teams that could help us in better organizing ourselves.

Right now we have a scouting team, outreach comittee, fundraising comittee, technical team, FLL Mentor team, Jr. FLL Mentor team, VEX robotics team, FIRST Build Team, Promotional Team, and a BEST robotics team. With all these teams, it is still hard to keep people interested and active.

Jr. FLL, VEX, and the Promotional team are all new this year, But we have no idea about how to make sure that we keep all these people. It may even be 150+ kids that join the club next year.

Please help us in finding out how to keep our club solid with this many people.
If there is another thread jsut liek this, sorry. I searched and found threads about organization, but none that dealt with organization of teams with large numbers. Thanks

[Joshua May]

How about sending some of those members out to us, we've got about 15.

Perhaps it would be possible to split to two teams? I'm not sure about this, especially when it comes to the aspects of money and room, but it's an idea nonetheless.

As of know, I can't really see anything else your team can do () beyond what you have, sounds like a great progam, though.

[unapiedra]

Wow!

I don't know how many of those are really advanced (robotics wise) but there are always college type robotics competitions or even professional competitions like the DARPA Grand Challenge (too late for this year but start building, this will take you a year).

I totally agree with Josh distribute your students to other teams... We sure would like it!

If you have the money (which you can make with that many students) you can build two robots. I am not exactly sure what the rules say for this, so you might not be able to switch those during the competition. I think about this like that: Have either two identical robots, that would enable you to make changes without risking anything (especially during competition) and even if one of them brakes -- you just take another robot...
The other version would be having two different robots. This means you could have two groups in your teams work on one each. If you would co-ordinate it right one robot could be more offense and the other more defense (or what ever you need in next year's competition), one strong, the other fast...

Well, you see where I am going, think about it!

Or add a European Support team ;-)

[santosh]

Originally Posted by unapiedra

Or add a European Support team ;-)

Sorry, I forgot about creating this team. lol

[coastertux]

Team 1640 had the total opposite problem last year...not enough people. Anyways, sounds like too many. Try two teams like someone said above.

[Jeff Rodriguez]

You could create an application process that's required to join the team. The application wouldn't be used to turn students down, but rather to get a better understanding of what their interests are and what they would be good at. It could help organize the team into areas of interest to the students.

[Collin Fultz]

Originally Posted by Ogre

You could create an application process that's required to join the team. The application wouldn't be used to turn students down, but rather to get a better understanding of what their interests are and what they would be good at. It could help organize the team into areas of interest to the students.

Applications are also a good way to weed people out. You can still make it such that everybody that turns in an application is accepted onto the team (which I am in favor of), but the simple act of turning in an application and actually putting the work into it will deter some of your "tag-a-long" people and give you the people who really want to be there.

In all, don't fear the large team, use it to make an even larger difference.

[K.Shaw]

Go to the link to get an idfea of a FIRST Application this is what we use. Team 237's Online Application

[Beth Sweet]

Well, first off, the phrase "is our team too large" or "how can we reduce the size" indicates that there is some issue with team size. Are some of these students not doing anything? Maybe that may be the determining factor. Are all 140 of these students from the same high school? How many mentors do you have? These questions may help you into splitting into two teams. If you want to stay one team, then I would suggest 1 of 2 options.

-Option 1: Dismiss students who are not doing anything on the team. With 140 members (or the 80 some you said you had this year) I can't possibly imagine that all members are actively participating. Tell them that you are glad that they were interested, but you need to keep only active students.

-Option 2: Have a team where only juniors and seniors travel. If your issue is with travel budgets (which I imagine that it is) then this would help. Allow all kids to participate in the build season but reserve travel privilages for juniors and seniors or those who have been on the team for 2 years or something.

Good luck and congrats on establishing a team that so many students want to participate on!

[sanddrag]

That is absolutely huge. Whatever mentor that has to deal with that number of kids deserves some sort of award or something.

Anywhow, I think your application/entry process is not strict enough. Making your team smaller can be a very wise move.

To me, one of the great things about FIRST has always been that unlike many other clubs/activities, it is not something people join just to say they did it or just to say they are in it or just to help get into college or whatever. People join and stay involved because they care, and because they want to learn and progress their skills. To me, it seems unlikely that all 140 people are in it for this reason. If there is anyone in it just to be in it, that is no good. Yes all colleges care about is how many clubs you were in in high school but to me it is useless if you are not a key member who is really devoted.

I would rather see you let fewer people be more involved and gain more from the program rather than let all these people be in it just so they can say so.

If you don't want to reduce the number of people, I'd say split into two or even three teams, or build two or three alike or different (probably better/more fun to go with different ones) robots during the build season.

[Cory]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

That is absolutely huge. Whatever mentor that has to deal with that number of kids deserves some sort of award or something.

I'm guessing that the majority of them aren't kids, and are mentors from GT who 1002 is partnered with.

If you actually have 140 dedicated people, good luck. I don't see any possible way that you can effectively and efficiently use all of them.

[unapiedra]

If the data I found (here) is correct, that would mean you have 15% of your students participate. Wow!

[Winged Wonder]

Wow. As countless people before me have stated, with that many students, if you're coming from two or more different schools, you may want to split up the team between schools to make it more managable if all 80 -140 students are truly active in it. Although, from my experience, a separation of the team was absolutely unthinkable.

last year i had a team of 72 students. the year before that, there were about 52. i've found, that when it comes to a robotics team, sometimes having too many people around can be counterproductive. you can only have so many hands in a small space (lets say a gearbox), so that leaves a lot of people bored and not doing anything. What i would suggest (this is something we have been doing for years) is creating requirements for going on trips, like having dedicated x amout of hours to the team working on whatever (spirit stuff, building the robot, chairman's award, website, etc.) and they need to have participated in y amount of fundraisers throughout the year. (i'd suggest you start with the fundraising now if you havent already, especially with having a team that large). the basic reasoning behind this is that it shows you (on paper!) who is really dedicated to the team, and who is a slacker. (although there are innovative slackers who find ways around this.. but i'm sure you can figure out how to deal with them) The requirements for each regional you go to (if you go to more than one) can change accordingly; for the more expensive regionals, the team members have to work harder to attend it.

Also, (i'm not sure if this will work; my team is going to try it this year and let everyone know how it went...) you could try to divide your team. I know it sounds crazy, because we all love teamwork, but you cant have 50 people try to be on pit crew and have no one work on Chairman's Award. it just doesnt work like that. Pit crew gets nothing done, and Chairman's Award doesnt get the attention it needs. You can develop your own partitioning system, but this year (instead of last year, where we had about 15 or more separate chaotic groups) we are separating the team into 3 groups: Public Relations (PR), Mechanical, and Information Technology (IT). within these group there are separate divisions... for example, in the PR group, there are divisions for fundraising, public relations, spirit, chairmans/woody flowers awards, and more. Students can move around between these divisions as they wish, but they cannot change groups and suddenly wish to be on the Pit Crew if they've been working on Spirit stuff. this increases the teamwork between students within each group... so its like having 3 separate, more managable teams within your own large team... in theory. but i'm not sure, thats just what we figured should happen.. but you never know.

i hope this helps.. and good luck with your team almost doubling in size...

oh, in regards to scouting-- dont just have a separate little circle of people for scouting. thats boring for them and its not fair that everyone gets to have fun at the competition, but they have to sit for long periods of time and watch robots... not that theres anything wrong with that, but everyone needs a break after looking at scouting sheets for ... ever. so--especially with such a large team-- teach everyone to scout, and have everyone scout 1 to 2 hour shifts at competition. That way, you make good use of your man/woman power, and no one has an excuse to not understand the game. (my advice, watch a webcast together to learn to scout together if you're not competing in the first week).

ok i think i've put in my $0.02 and then some... i know generally people hate long posts, but i made this as concise as possible while still giving the best advice i could. good luck again!

[spears312]

Having such a large amount of students is often a difficult situation. In my opinion, I don't really consider dropping people or limiting admissions an option, and as far as splitting the team in two, like it's been said, that depends entirely on space and money. This past season Heatwave had 100+ students join the team in September, by the time we got to January we only had about 70 members active, but not all of which traveled to both regionals and nationals. It is my personal goal to try and get nearly 100 members this year and keep at least 90 of them active.

I'm working on some "unofficial" ideas about splitting the team into sub-teams, similar to what you, then winged wonder mentioned. By splitting the team up I intend to get people placed into these groups and have them devote their efforts to one or more of the teams. I hope that this will give everyone the opportunity to actually do something for the team. With each of these teams geared toward a specific aspect of a FIRST team and with both a mentor and responsible student in charge of each team. If it works right, it should almost be like teams within a team, and hopefully work out if everything goes well. But, this is just my idea, it may work for you, it may not, it's only still in a sort of "development stage"

Good luck to your team

Originally Posted by sanddrag
That is absolutely huge. Whatever mentor that has to deal with that number of kids deserves some sort of award or something.

^good point. Hope you figure something out.

[Not2B]

...waiting for someone from 862 to post, other than me...

OK, no one posted from our team. We topped out at 72 students this year. With 3 active mentors, that's rough. But we don't kick anyone out. If you show up and you want to learn, listen, turn something on the lathe, rivit some metal, whatever - as long as you get something out of it.

Us mentors really don't do anything but direct traffic. Not because we don't want to, or blah blah blah... but because if I tighten a nut, that's something, someone could have done.

It got so bad we were going to attach each freshmen to a tool every day. If we needed that tool, they did the work. Tools could rotate each day. Hacksaw was tired every day. Chainbreaker was always Chainbreaker - because that was his nickname, and he was the only one who could work it.

We fear that we may break 100 next year. Wait, who am I kidding. We have over 100 signed up from 8th grade, plus the 60 or so returning students.